


That Which We Call A Rose

by imkerfuffled



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-23 23:15:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6133462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imkerfuffled/pseuds/imkerfuffled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"And for that name, which is no part of thee / Take all myself."</em> -Romeo and Juliet</p><div class="original-line">
  <p> </p>
</div><div class="original-line">
  <p>Rose Wallace. To her father, she is his "little flower." To her mother, her "darling rosebud." To her classmates, "Nosy Rosy."</p>
</div><div class="original-line">
  <p> </p>
</div><div class="original-line">
  <p>She is seven years old when the book finds her.</p>
</div>
            </blockquote>





	That Which We Call A Rose

**Author's Note:**

> This was greatly inspired by AtypicalOwl's [Butterflies!Verse](http://archiveofourown.org/series/235059), only less heartbreakingly gorgeous, because nothing can beat that series when it comes to being heartbreakingly gorgeous. Seriously, if you haven't read it yet, go do that. Now. It's amazing.

There is nothing more powerful than a name.

In a world bursting at the seams with over seven billion people, in a galaxy, a universe housing more sentient beings than the human mind can ever hope to comprehend, a name sets you apart. It defines you. It makes you unique. It becomes a part of your soul.

A name can tell you a lot about a person. It can tell you their background; where they’re from, what their parents are like, how old they are. A nickname, or lack thereof, can tell you more.

Rose Wallace.

Her name tells you her parents are gardening enthusiasts with a love of Shakespeare. It tells you she has thorns, but she only uses them for defense.

She’s proud of her name. She doesn’t let anyone turn it into a nickname, but that doesn’t mean some people don’t anyway.

“My little flower,” her father calls her. Her mother: “my darling rosebud.” These nicknames she doesn’t mind; they tell her that her parents love her more than anything in the world. It’s the other nickname that bothers her, the one grown-ups call her when they think they’re being funny, like she isn’t standing right there and can hear everything they say. It’s the one kids at school call her sometimes, when they’re being mean.

Nosy Rosy.

She doesn’t mind being called nosy. In fact, she takes it as a compliment. It’s just the dumb, annoying rhyme that she doesn’t like, and the way people use it as an insult.

She is seven years old. She is sitting in her father’s English classroom after school, waiting for him to finish grading papers, so he can take her home. And she is living up to her nickname.

A bookcase sits along the back wall of her father’s classroom, filled with novels stacked every which way imaginable. Her father has told her not to read these books because they’re for big kids, and instead she should take from the box of toys and books that he keeps behind his desk for her. But occasionally she picks up some of the big-kid books anyway and sneaks them home in her backpack. She reads them in secret, as if she’s actually afraid of getting caught, and she scrunches her nose at all the weird things the big kids do in the books. Most of them seem to involve boys. She doesn’t get it.

This time, she doesn’t pick a book about boys. She picks up a book about magic, because it has a neat picture on the front, and the title is in a cool font.

That night, she curls up under her blanket with a flashlight, pretending she’s part of a medieval conspiracy to steal magic away from the people by banning books on the subject, and she reads. She reads by trailing her finger under every line and whispering every word out loud to herself.

“ _In Life’s name,”_ she reads, “ _and for Life’s sake._ ” She knows just enough about promises to know how important the words are.

She reads: about names, and about power. She reads about Names, and she reads about Powers, and she learns how to say her name in the language of power.

She reads about evil in the universe.

She gets to the last page of the book, and she turns one page more, and she reads about things she never expects to see in a magic book. Science, and math, and space.

A week after she first takes the book home, she still hasn’t returned it to her father’s classroom. It’s still sitting there in her backpack when school starts, and it’s still sitting there when it ends. She’s thinking about it when she walks out the front doors, and when she crosses the street from her elementary school to the junior high where her father is working late again, and she’s thinking about it so hard that she almost doesn’t notice the giant airplane sitting in the middle of the athletic field.

Almost.

There’s also three couches, a chair, a motorcycle, something that might have come from a computer, and countless more bits and pieces than she can identify. Two grown-ups are standing in the middle of it all, talking to the airplane. One of them has his hands on his hips and looks like he’s trying not to laugh. The other one keeps scratching his head.

Rose knows enough about middle school to know airplanes are definitely not supposed to be a part of them, even in her dad’s big-kid books, and she knows enough about New York to know there aren’t supposed to be parrots sitting in trees either.

So she does the sensible thing. She says “hi” to the parrot, and introduces herself.

“Hola,” the parrot says back. It tells her its name is Peach. It’s a short name, like Rose. She remembers reading that the shortest names usually hold the most power, because they’re the ones that can have the most meanings.

The parrot tilts its head at her and gives her a funny, squinty-eyed look.

“Do you like magic books?” it asks.

Rose’s eyes widen. “How did you know?”

“I’m a magic bird.” It glances over at the athletic field, where the first grown-up is now sitting on the ground, laughing his head off, and the other appears to be arguing with a very nice sports car. The plane is nowhere in sight. The parrot turns back to Rose and says, “Do you want to know a secret?”

She nods her head nearly hard enough to shake her glasses off her nose. The bird leans in closer.

“I have another name. A special name, one nobody can know about.” It flaps a wing at the two grown-ups. “You can’t tell them about it.”

Then it glides down from its branch, lands on her shoulder, and whispers a Name into her ear. It’s short. It’s powerful. It holds a promise against evil.

“Use it when you’re in trouble,” the bird says, “I’ve got a feeling you’re going to need it.” 

* * *

 

Rose keeps reading and reading and reading, wanting to soak up every word the book has to offer, like she’s a sponge stuck in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Every time she thinks she’s read it all, she finds a new chapter she hasn’t seen yet.

She reads about good and evil and a mix of the two. She reads about the time before time, and a story that sounds intriguingly similar to one she’s heard at Bible study already. She reads about the Powers, and two in particular: one she knows by a different name, and another she suspects she knows by a true name.

Another week passes, and the sun goes out in the middle of the afternoon, and she reads about that too. About a girl and a boy, except this time there’s nothing weird between them even though it’s a big-kid book. About a speck of light that saves the day. About courage and sacrifice and about defending what grows and lives well in its own way.

She reads about names, and how they can be changed.

That week, her class takes a field trip to the science museum to start off their astronomy unit. Their teacher leads them around the exhibits, explaining them all to the class. When they get to the exhibit about the sun, there are lots of questions about how it went out earlier that week, because seven year olds know enough about stars already to know they’re not supposed to do that. But instead of answering, the teacher falters. If Rose doesn’t know better, she would say she looks scared.

So Rose answers for her. She explains about the girl and the boy, and how they and a speck of light defeated the forces of evil by reading.

The teacher tells her off for making up stories, and the kids all laugh at her. They call her Nosy Rosy again, only this time they don’t seem to have a reason.

She doesn’t understand. She’s just trying to help; why can’t they see that? Why can’t they see that she isn’t joking, she isn’t lying for attention, she isn’t any of these things they think she is? How can she speak to a rock, or a plant, or a parrot and understand them perfectly, but when she tries to talk to human beings nothing ever makes sense? She’s only trying to help; it’s not fair!

She hardly hears the rest of the teacher’s lesson, about stars and how they burn. How two tiny atoms crash together inside them to create something completely new, and let off an explosion of light and energy in the process.

She’s too busy blinking away the tears that sting at the corners of her eyes.

Before long, the class moves on to the next exhibit, and she falls to the back of the group, her fists clenched at her sides to try and stop the tears from showing. She won’t let herself cry in front of these people. She won’t! That would be worse than anything. Worse than the name-calling, worse than the laughing, worse than the lies. She won’t—

She can’t do it. The tears come anyway, wet and scalding against her cheeks. First one, then another, then whole streams of them, big fat tears rolling down her face, and she starts making little hiccup noises that she has no control over, and she has to get out of here, now, before anyone sees! She’s behind the rest of the group; no one’s watching her, not even the chaperones; she can make a run for it; there’s a bathroom a few exhibits back that she can hide in—

She bolts, whispering a few magic words to make the air solid under her feet, so her shoes don’t make a sound against the tile. If there are other people staring at her as she sprints back through the sun exhibit and into a section about Einstein, she doesn’t care. She remembers reading about Einstein in her book—anything to keep her mind off her classmates and their taunts—he wasn’t magic himself, but he knew how it works. She remembers E=mc2, and how mass can turn into energy if you persuade it well enough. She remembers some other stuff that goes way over her head too, but the E=mc2 part—that’s the part everyone knows.

What she doesn’t remember is to look where she’s going, and she runs right into a man who isn’t a man.

He towers above her, dressed all in black, and shadows seem to bend around him. Suddenly the museum seems a lot darker, and colder, and… and…

She knows his name.

Every fiber of her being tells her to run, scream, but her muscles have forgotten how to move. She wants to shout for help and call Peach’s name—the true name, the secret one—but her throat is squeezed tight and her tongue is frozen stiff, and she can’t manage anything more than a tiny, whimpering squeak.

“Is this what They send me these days? Pathetic,” says the man who is not a man. Nothing about his voice sounds evil, not in any way she can identify, but it sends shivers running up and down her spine. He smiles, and her blood turns to ice.

“The so-called Light Powers have placed in your tiny little hands the impossible task of stopping me at my work. They expect you to try, and they expect you to fail because you’re far too young to comprehend my power,” says the Lone Power, “If you value your current state of existence, you’ll forget you ever picked up that book of yours. This is your only warning.”

And then It’s gone, and she’s running back to her class like her life depends on it, willing to face her classmates’ teasing again and again, constantly, for the rest of her life if it means she never has to see that man who isn’t a man again. She isn’t crying anymore, only because she’s too terrified to remember how.

But if the Lone Power expects her to back down because of some threat, It doesn’t understand her at all. She knows enough about bullies to know they have to be stopped, and she knows enough about roses to know how bad their thorns can hurt.

And she knows enough about crime dramas and big-kid spy novels to know how this sort of thing works. 

* * *

 

She returns to the museum after dark, when visiting hours are long over, and the janitors have all gone home for the night. It’s easy enough to sneak out of the house; she just has to silence her footsteps again and talk the lock on the front door into opening for her. Sneaking into the museum is even easier. She only says a single magic word to the brick wall outside, and it lets her in without a complaint.

Inside, it’s darker now than it felt that morning, because the lights are all out, but also because of the growing presence deep within the space wing, drawing the darkness around it like a cloak made of the night sky as seen from the remotest corners of the Earth, but unsullied by any stars, as the Starsnuffer would have it.

It’s standing by the Einstein exhibit again, that man who is not a man, and It is speaking. Speaking in that language of power that she doesn’t fully understand yet.

But she understands this.

It is speaking to the sunlight far on the other side of the globe, and to the sun that created it, and It is telling it to stop crashing atoms together. It tells the sun to spread the message to every other star in the area, every pinpoint of light that gives life to the planets orbiting it.

And then It tells it, in an even, measured tone. A reasonable tone. To do the impossible.

Reverse the process.

Send the atoms spinning away from each other on rewind. Take all that sunlight, all that energy, and convert it back into matter. Flip the equation.

The Lone Power sees Rose standing there at the edge of the exibit, and It smiles that terrible smile again, because she knows enough about stars to know what that would mean for life here on Earth if It is allowed to finish the spell.

But she is Rose Wallace. Her father’s little flower. Her mother’s darling rosebud. Nosy Rosy. Her thorns may be small, but they are sharp.

She doesn’t know how to defeat the Lone Power on her own. She can’t. But she knows how to call for help.

She opens her mouth, takes a deep breath, and begins to speak. Her accent is sloppy, her pronunciations aren’t always accurate, but the universe leans in around her, holding on to her every word.

She describes the syllables of a name—not that other Power’s, but her own. She describes her parents’ love of gardening and Shakespeare. She describes her own pride and anger and shame and curiosity. She describes her Oath. She describes her thorns.

And then, just before she reaches the next part in her name, describing her age and her height and her experience, she switches tracks. She begins describing, not her own name, but the name of that other Power’s. The true name.

She sees the Lone One’s face contort in a flash of fear, and she smiles, because It knows It is beaten.

She finishes the last syllable, and sees scarlet and blue and green.

The spell takes.

There’s an explosion of light and energy, so great and so terrible that any mortal would be blinded to look directly at it, and the man that is not a man screams a scream more terrible than the light, writhing, twisting in on Itself until there is nothing left of It but the echo of a spell unfinished.

Rose changes her own name, if only for the time it takes for one atom to crash into another and become something bigger than itself. 

* * *

 

When the police enter the museum it is nearly morning, but the sun hasn’t yet poked up its head. The multiple reports of a brilliant flash of light coming from every window of the building, pouring through solid brick like it was little more than glass, sounded fantastical within the practical walls of the police station. But now, they have their doubts. Light—or the memory of light—seems to linger in the air, growing brighter and more solid as they go further into the museum.

They arrive on the scene to find two men already there, with a scarlet macaw perched on one’s shoulder, its head bowed. No one thinks to question them. Only later will the police officers find that strange, and by then none of them will be able to recall what the men look like, or even agree on their gender. One thing everyone will be sure of is the macaw—though one officer will call it a parrot—sitting there, poised like it’s in mourning.

Of the man dressed all in black, they find no trace. But there, between the giant model of the sun and the poster of Albert Einstein, they find the little girl with the book clutched in her hands, her skin glowing softly even in death.


End file.
